CARRIE ANN BAADE:

From the Autobiographical to the Universal

I paint linking the power of historical masterworks with my own experience as a contemporary artist. By using this fragmentary “bone yard” of painting with reverence, I am a scavenger salvaging lost aesthetics. My art has been an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, resulting in an exploitation of fragmentation found in collage; I think of myself as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein attempting to piece together the sublime.

These painted parables comprised of remnants of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, create surreal landscapes inhabited by exotic figures. As the steward and axman, I return to the haunting moments in art history in order to reclaim them, not merely as a quotation of a theme or an image, but to recapture the materiality of methods and techniques in which they were created. The material strategies necessary to deploy these paintings bring a contemporary voice to the past while contemplating the ageless issues of morality, politics, and the individual quest for self-expression.